Rewind: Bond Week

There have been great Bonds and there have been questionable Bonds, but at some point during every one of Ian Fleming’s stories you can’t help but envy 007. We can never decide whether it’s his watches, cars or inimitable coolness that keeps us coming back — so we had to cover them all. Our best from Bond week will keep you entertained whether you prefer Honey Ryder or Plenty O’Toole. Read on to see them all.

The Watches of James Bond
The history of James Bond and his timepiece choices can really be divided up into the “Rolex Era” and the “Omega Era”, despite the fact that the Bonds of Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton donned digital Seikos and a TAG Heuer in between. But Moore’s 007 had more to be ashamed of than what he wore on his wrist, and when was the last time you watched License to Kill? That’s what we thought. Read the Story »

The Hotels of James Bond
Every guy has dreamed of living the Bond life at some point in time. Practicing your Scottish accent in the mirror won’t guarantee that. But following 007’s jet-setting contrails? That’s totally doable gents, and it starts with finding the right place to stay on this list of Bond-approved accommodations. Read the Guide »

Bond Cars: What He Should Have Driven
What are as stunning as the women Bond has not-so-lasting relations with? His cars. Some — like the quintessential DB5 — we worship; others — the horrid AMC Hornet X Sedan, for example — are as tempting as having your privates divided by a laser beam. We decided to take a closer look at the definitive, the utterly awful and everything in between, all while selecting alternative rides that we think were worthy as secret agent transportation, for both the clunkers and the greats. Read the Story »

Interview: Bond’s Stunt Coordinators
21st century moviegoers think technology has taken the dirty work out of filmmaking, leaving the job of faking the “impossible” in the hands of the hardest-working person in the Hollywood: CGI. But the best action directors still understand there’s no airbrushing when it comes to the strain of a man at his desperate limits. Bond was invented to stretch our expectations of what one soul can do on his own, but on the silver screen, someone actually has to walk Fleming’s talk. These are the men who teach Daniel Craig to fight like a character of his enormous stature, and who sub in to do his dirty work when the danger gets real. Read the Interview »

Defense Journal: Bond’s Gun, the Walther PPK
Of iconic weapons — Dirty Harry’s “most powerful” .44 Magnum, Rooster Cogburn’s Winchester 1894 lever-action repeating rifle, Indiana Jones’ Webley Mark VI, Scarface’s “little friend” — the Walther has endured. It is the only device used by all the Bond actors (exploding pen or speargun, anyone?); yes, even that guy from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. We examine where the fictional meets the real history of the Walther PPK. Read the Story »

Bollinger 002 for 007 Champagne
The truth is, we’ve never sipped an ounce of champagne from this silencer-inspired bottle of Bollinger 002 for 007 Limited Edition Champagne (~$160), which opens only when the code “007? is entered into the gimmicky combination lock. But we have been fortunate enough to taste this particular vintage of Bollinger La Grande Année 2002 once before, and we relished every drop of it. Read the Review »

This year Walter Lange turned 90, and the company his grandfather built celebrates 20 years since its post-Cold War rebirth. In commemoration, here's a look back at some of GP's best Lange & Söhne coverage.

In sports and fitness, training plans and pounding the pavement can take you a long way. But sometimes it takes more than a blue collar work ethic: it helps to have bits of wisdom from seasoned vets, deep scientific insight and cleverly-designed products. Since kicking off Limits, we've scraped together knowledge about everything from the effect of caffeine on endurance to importance of VO2 max testing. We still fall down at stoplights occasionally, no amount of wisdom can prevent that. Here's what we've learned.

There's a time for relaxing with a good craft beer, but this year's Malted Madness tournament was not one of them. It took a great deal of humility, but we shelved our self-proclaimed beer snobbery for the sake of a single question: what's the best mass market beer available? It wasn't easy, but we got an answer, and some other cool articles, besides.

Dive watches are more popular than ever, despite most divers choosing not to wear them. Never mind. We're all for getting our watches wet. Here's a selection of our favorite dive watches and some adventures we've had with them.

What's that bright thing in the sky? Is that...is that the sun? We're not done with winter's worst yet, but a look back at some of our cold-weather pieces should help you fill out your much-needed wintry gear set. Only a few more weeks, folks. We're almost there.

A resurgent interest in the mechanical timepieces has grown a whole new crop of watch enthusiasts, people hungry for not only eye candy (which we happily provide weekly), but also knowledge about wrist-based micro-engineering marvels. We're here to help. This collection of our best educational articles might just save your precious timepiece from a busted date mechanism or save you from embarrassment the next time someone asks you what a helium release valve is for. We call it Timekeeping 101.

We’re not the sort to grandstand, but this has been a pretty good year: we rolled out Limits, Octane and Timekeeping; we traveled to Cuba, Kenya and Indonesia; we dived with sharks in the Bahamas, drove a tank in Minnesota and ran an ultramarathon in the mountains of Vermont. We drank beer and Irish Whiskey, responsibly.
Each of which, in one way or another, pales in comparison to our GP100, released in October, which honored the 100 best consumer products released during the calendar year by companies of all sizes and scope. It wasn't not a ranking or a contest. Instead, our selections represented the inspiring and the practical, the groundbreaking and the traditional, the priceless and the accessible. In short: products that defined or defied their respective categories to better the life of the modern man. Looking back, they're an excellent inspiration: you'll buy only the best products in 2014. In the meantime, aren't you still itching for those few things no one got you for Christmas...?
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Technology is constantly reshaping the world, to both our benefit and frustration. From a macro standpoint, the changes wrought during 2013 weren’t surprising at all. Computing increased; pixels were packed closer; connectivity expanded -- just like the analysts said they would. We yawned with indifference while promptly pre-ordering, then tossed the pinnacles of 2012's innovation on Craigslist.
Still, a few trends did stand out amid the churning tech landscape. The actions and unique characteristics of our bodies have officially joined the digital party, providing new forms of interactions, security concerns and data points. Novel careers in the gaming industry button-mashed ever closer to the mainstream while the consoles wars reset for the decade to come. Personal devices like smartphones finally became personalizable and, in some cases, made in America. True to our heritage, we also devoted plenty of man-hours to simplifying your acquisition quests by researching, testing and sharing the best devices available in countless critical tech categories.
Just in case you missed any of it, here you’ll find a retrospective on some of our favorite forays into the world of technology during 2013. Enjoy them now in the pre-obsolescence stages of their lives, and make sure you check back soon. Next year will bring plenty of innovation again, and we’ll be here to cover it like only GP can.

This year, we saw a lot of the royal baby, puppy-related lists and Miley Cyrus. All interesting, to be sure, but the cultural equivalent of junk food -- enjoyable but unsatisfying. Empty calories.
If culture is the measure of a society, we want substantive culture -- the whole grains, fruits and vegetables of life. Over the past year, we sowed the seeds of quality, and now we pick the ten best crops of the harvest. Enjoy the best of booze, food, travel (some of it occupying a legal grey area), architecture, cigars, coffee and more. Eat all you want -- we grew them just for you.

The launch of Limits in June was one of those moments when everything seems so logical and inevitable, and then the announcement goes live, you have a sip of coffee, and think: Wait, how did we get so wrapped up in endurance sports? Isn’t it a pretty niche category? Does this mean we have to do an Ironman every year?
The answer to the latter two questions is yes, sort of. The field of competitors and the quantity of staggeringly difficult races grows each year, and you’ll find us in the field reporting, usually wearing some kind of spandex. The answer to the question about how we got so wrapped up in this world helps explain how our sports and adventure coverage has evolved over the past year and where we see it going in 2014.
The soul of endurance sports is finding that point when you don’t want to go any further, when it feels like physically and mentally like you can’t, when all but a fraction of a percent of people quit -- and then continuing anyway (with negative splits). As our athlete-adventurers reported back from their journeys, we realized that, in fact, this unites all sports, from rock climbing and mountaineering to surfing and cycling. To thrive in any of these disciplines requires a commitment to raise the middle finger to pain and frustration -- and monotony, sometimes -- in the hopes of achieving a goal that previously seemed impossible. Maybe we discover something new about ourselves, maybe we just have one hell of a day.
What we ended up with is Limits, a section grounded in enduring and yet inclusive of all adventures that test the will. These are some of our favorite stories -- and we can promise that year will be even more exciting.

In 2011, Jimmy Chin climbed one of the hardest peaks in the world, Shark's Fin on Mount Meru. What's more impressive is that he filmed the adventure, then turned it into a documentary that just won big at Sundance.